Why is Minecraft so addictive?!?

These last few weeks I’ve been completely hooked on Minecraft again. It’s a game that I didn’t start playing until a year after it was released on the Xbox 360. When I heard about it from friends I never thought it was a game I would appreciate.

What’s the objective? Is there a finish line? What are you supposed to do?

I’m not usually into sandbox games, since my time is scarce and I tend to turn to my retro games which I can pick up and put down and finish within the hour when I’ve gotten good enough in a game. I stay away from games that I know require 100+ hours to just get through the storyline, like Skyrim and Fallout. I also stay away from games where you can have various outcomes, like Mass Effect, where they force you to play the game over and over again to explore the different endings. It stresses me out! Because I’m a completionist >_< And I don’t have the time to spend 500+ hours in one game, time that could have been spent experiencing 100 other games… it gives me anxiety just thinking about it

Minecraft confuses me though.. I don’t understand what it is about it that keeps me spending hour after hour in that one game, not even striving to get achievements or accomplishing anything particular.. When I played it on the Xbox 360 I was completely hooked for months! It was all I played! I enjoyed playing it with my best friend online, and we would sit for hours just mining, collecting, building, crafting, and mining some more… We only had a few achievements left eventually, but we didn’t attempt to get them, until the very end. When we eventually had them all, THEN I could let the game go.. it was a sad goodbye though, but I felt like I didn’t have a purpose to continue playing it. Until it got released on Xbox One……

I’m right back where I was. I’ve taken many of the achievements but I’m purposefully avoiding those last ones.. they’re not particularly hard, I could have finished them weeks ago, but I haven’t. Instead I spend each evening gardening, planting flowers, growing crops, expanding my house, mining tunnels, exploring the world, gathering ores and diamonds, crafting, cutting wood, trading with some villagers, crafting some more, breeding cows, killing some cows, swimming across oceans, crafting a boat, throwing eggs, making glass, colouring sheep, shearing those sheep, digging for clay, making plant pots, fetching lava in buckets, mining some more, dying in the nether, dying from creepers, adding another floor to my house, taming a horse, building a stable, and so on..

What is it that keeps me going? For some reason I have this strangely deep urge to keep playing this one game. It’s not like that with any other game, and I don’t necessarily consider Minecraft being the best game in the world, there’s so many other games that are better, but Minecraft still keeps me hooked… doing all these tedious tasks.. for what?!

I don’t know….

…..It might just be the company ^_^

I know for a fact though that when I come home, with the intention of doing something else tonight, something useful, I’m still going to end up playing Minecraft… XD